Hello SR readers. I am migrating to WP in the next few days and honestly I am not sure if you are subscribed to this blog via RSS that it will just transfer over. If you don’t get posts in the next few days, it is likely you may have to resubscribe, unless I find the plugin magic soon. Just a friendly warning… And f*ck it is HOT in Chicago.

An auspicious day: Sarge has been released and the Golub has defended his dissertation with success! Congratulations Alex.

Yo, yo, help out if you haver the knowledge/desire:

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The Social Science Research Council invites you to collaborate on a real-time history of the politics of open source software adoption. We are pleased to offer a first version of this account?POSA 1.0 (500KB .pdf)–in both .pdf and wiki versions, here POSA 1.0 includes contributions from Gabriella Coleman, Kenneth Cukier, Shay David, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Eugene Kim, Volker Grassmuck, Bildad Kagai, Nicolas Kimolo, and Jennifer Urban, and is edited by Joe Karaganis (SSRC) and Robert Latham (SSRC).

Our project begins with the observation that accounts of the Free and/or Open Source Software (FOSS) movement, to date, have been oriented mostly by the improbable fact of FOSS?s existence. At this stage of FOSS development and advocacy, we want to ask a different set of questions?not how open source works as a social and technical project, or whether open source provides benefits in terms of cost, security, etc., but rather how open source is becoming embedded in political arenas and policy debates. For our purposes, understanding the ?politics of adoption? means stepping back from the task of explaining or justifying FOSS in order to ask how increasingly canonical explanations and justifications are mobilized in different political contexts. POSA 1.0 maps many of the different kinds of political and institutional venues in which FOSS adoption is at stake. It tries to understand important institutional actors within those venues, and the ways in which arguments for and against FOSS are framed and advanced. It seeks to clarify the different opportunities and constraints facing FOSS adoption in different sectors and parts of the world. It is an inevitably partial account that–we hope–can be extended and deepened by other participants in these processes. We invite your help in preparing POSA 2.0.
To sweeten the pot, two prizes of $250 will be awarded to the best
contributions to POSA 2.0

So I have a few friends in town in Chicago and we have been out, hitting the streets, going out, and having some good food. Recently I discovered a gem of a restaurant in the south side, Cafe Trinidad. It has great Caribbean food (of the Indo-Caribbean type), and they give you servings that will induce a serious coma if you eat it all.

A Grassroots Expose of the Impact of India’s New Patent Legislation on AIDS Treatment

This ethnographic based project is timely. Given India’s recent change in patent laws, these academics/activists are going to document, on the ground, how families manage (or not) to get AIDS drugs. Look below for the project goals:

During the summer of 2005, we plan to create a baseline record that establishes how India’s HIV-infected populations depend on the Indian versions of Western patented Anti-retro Viral (ARV) drugs to survive. The baseline will also establish how they think they will manage as drug prices surge and any stockpiled drugs are depleted.

Using audio recorders, photographs and video, we plan to document the lives of families struggling to buy ARV drugs to keep a family member healthy; the challenges that stigmatized AIDS patients face in trying to earn enough money to buy the lifesaving treatment; activists desperately searching for new sources of inexpensive ARV drugs or lobbying the Indian government to grant compulsory licenses to continue producing cheap drugs. We plan to visit AIDS shelters and hospices in and around Mumbai, Bangalore, and Chennai.

The voices of those who support the new patent laws are only growing louder in the press, while the opposition to the law from the families and activists struggling to keep HIV-infected people alive has been reduced to one sentence that appears in almost all articles about the benefits of india’s new patent laws: “Some international medical-aid organizations protested the new patent regime, arguing it could crimp the supply of inexpensive generic drugs made in India.”

They have faced significant hurdles getting funding from traditional NGO’s (via their blog). Do support them with a small donation or if broke, do spread the word!

I am back from PR which was somewhat relaxing, somewhat not. I will return June 23rd for a longer trip but I wanted to get some of my life here back in order. Also a couple of friends are defending on Monday and wanted to see the show. One of them is Rex and he has posted his abstract. Reminds me I should do the same but perhaps after I move to Word Press this weekend (I hope).
Good luck Rex!

So my mom composed this song about a year ago and unfortunately I don’t have a digital recorder to record it but she is demanding that I publish it before someone else claims that they authored it. She is *very excited* that this song will exist, out there on that nebulous Internet which she has never really had the chance to see.

She sings this song to about every person she meets so perhaps it will become a popular folk song. If you know anything about Puerto Rican politics, this song is pretty funny, although somewhat inflammatory (which makes it all that much better), because she is dising, hard, the current political status quo, which is commenwealth, a sort of semi-colonial state.

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Puertorriquenos toma conciencia
en estas eleciones, usa tu inteligencia

Puertorriquenos tu dignidad esta en la independencia
o en la Estadidad
Y NADA MAS, nada mas ….

Puertorriquenos toma conciencia

(sound maracas, move to dancing)

by Vera Coleman
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A few folks people have been asking, so “what next?” The immediate next is that I am here in Puerto Rico, visitng my mom, and nursing my sinuses which of course got mucus-blasted with an infection due to the pressure and stress of finishing up. I have not been here since December and not much has changed although the temperature is characteristicaly HOT and actually my mom is doing better which is relief. The sinuses are recovering thanks to the salty ocean water and thick humid air. There was something remarakbly different about swimming in the ocean without a looming dissertation. Really… different. I am also lowering the caffeine intake which always seems easier to do here because there are less demands made on brain (although I have to do a lot of word catching for my mom) and I really think there is something about the sun and ocean water that makes the withdrawl effects much less severe. I think when I return in July I will go off of it entirely at least for a few weeks.

Back in Chicago, I am going to edit the diss before depositing, figure out how to format it (hell hell and more hell) and start reading because I basically stopped doing so in the last 2 months. I will also start catching up on emails that are starting to pile high here in my inbox. I will answer a number of those on the plane flight home now that I have a computer with a battery worth something.

I plan to take most of July off-off. Go back to PR for a number of weeks and then I hope attend and give a paper at What the Hack. But they are having a heck of a time getting a permit so that is somewhat up in the netherworld of government administration (it would seem smarter to grant the permit to what has been a very orderly hacker festival that to deny the permit to some very bright hackers…. but then again that is just my prespective).

Then I am moving to the Garden State for a postdoc fellowship at the CCAC at Rutgers. I am psyched.

Along with that I hope to perhaps learn how to windsurf?? The life of the mind now needs some body life to keep going…

Thanks for everyone who has passed along a congratulations!

In 1997 I moved to _________ to start ________. Little did I know that it would ______ my life. I started on one ________ which took me to the far away country of _______. But then someone introduced me to this wacky world of ________. These people, mostly _________ would spend hours on the _______ and then they would ______ away what they ______ for _______.

I was so struck by this world of _______ that I dropped my old _________ and started to work on _________ instead.

Entering this ______ was more than what I ever could have ________. It was ________ and ________. I could barely stop __________. Finally I finished with the __________ and returned to ___________ where I began the torturous process of writing a __________. Years ______, I finally __________ and then found myself in a __________ with a ________ people ______________ at me. But when the people left the _______ they had a _______ on their _______ and at that point I knew it was all ____.

Now I have a ______ and more than anything it feels just _________.

I posted this over at DGI but I think it is worth mentioning over here since I write plently on IP law.

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Chris Ketly over at Savage Minds has written an excellent roundup of the ironies that plague academic publishing today. These ironies, however, are not all that humorous.

It is distressing to see the AAA abide by a closed publishing model, even while in public they are supposedly committed to “public anthropology.”

I think however the tide is shifting among academics. The recent resolution made by the Cornell Faculty Senate is a move in the right direction.

The Senate strongly encourages all faculty, and especially tenured faculty, to consider publishing in open access, rather than restricted access, journals or in reasonably priced journals that make their contents openly accessible shortly after publication.3

The Senate strongly urges all faculty to negotiate with the journals in which they publish either to retain copyright rights and transfer only the right of first print and electronic publication, or to retain at a minimum the right of postprint archiving.4